Mapivi is an open-source and cross-platform (UNIX, Mac OS X and Windows) picture manager / organizer written in Perl/Tk. It is a stand alone tool, there is no need for a web server, online access or a database.

I started working on Mapivi, because I needed a image viewer which is able to display and edit meta infos of JPEG pictures, like IPTC/IIM infos, EXIF and JPEG comments. But meanwhile Mapivi has become a serious image manager / organizer.

As hobby photographer I am mostly interested in the EXIF infos (like timestamp, camera model, focal length, exposure time, aperture, etc.) and the possibility to add and edit IPTC infos and JPEG comments. But I also want to rename pictures according to their internal date/time, to do lossless rotation and cropping, build picture galleries for the web and other stuff.

I use Mapivi also to manage and search my digital pictures [more]. The idea of using Mapivi as an picture manager is to keep the informations where they belong to - in the pictures.

When you add a comment to a picture (like "day in the garden with Tom Tim and Peter") or hierarchical IPTC keywords (like Nature.Plant.Flower.Rose) these meta information is stored in two places:

· In the picture, where they will stay even if you send the picture via email to a friend or show it on your homepage and· in a small database of Mapivi. Searching for e.g. "Tom" AND "Tim" in this database will find the picture pretty fast.

Other meta information is also stored in the database, like the short EXIF info (so you can search for the date the picture was taken or even the aperture you used) and the complete IPTC info. But the master information source is always the picture.

One big advantage of this decentral information storage is the independence of the tool, because the meta information can also be changed by other tools than Mapivi.

Mapivi is also able to do basic image processing (like adding a frame or unsharp mask operation) [more]. Mapivi serves here as a frontend (GUI) for many proven command line tools, like the Image Magick tools.

The advantages you have, when using Mapivi as a frontend to these tools are:

· simply choose the pictures to process by clicking on their thumbnail· useful default values for all supported manipulations· easy to use frontend· undo functionality (backup)· batch processing

What's New in This Release:

· This release provides new features like browsing pictures by location (Country/State/City/Sublocation from IPTC data).· The crop, EXIF date, search-duplicate, and the import dialog have been improved.· The IPTC caption is now editable directly in the main window.· Support for RAW, XMP, and WAV files is included.· Several lossless JPEG operations, like adding a border without picture recompression, have been added.· Some other minor features have been added and bugs have been fixed.